Unavailable…Olympics app and some popular books

Some very popular books, which have been available in the USA Kindle store, are currently unavailable.

This can happen to any book, and it can just be a temporary situation. Amazon suspended sales of my popular title, Love Your Kindle Fire: The ILMK Guide to Amazon’s Entertablet recently. In some sort of QA (Quality Assurance) review, they noticed that a picture that I had put into the file had not loaded properly to the Kindle store.

All I really had to do was remove the picture and re-upload…it wasn’t really necessary. I had described in words what to do at that point. The picture was just nice.

The Amazon rep even gave me instructions for how to include the picture. I may do that later, but I didn’t want to mess around with the book being off sale…especially with the first of the month coming. Why does the first of the month matter? People who use the KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library)

can borrow up to a book a calendar month. If they borrow one on July 5th and finish it on July 10th, they still need to wait until August first to borrow another book. Amazon compensates us for every “borrow”. What happens is that publishers using Kindle Direct Publishing can be part of a program. We divide a pool each month based on how many borrows we have.

Missing the beginning of the month of borrows would have had a negative impact on that.

So, if this had only been one book, I wouldn’t have been worried.

It seems, though, that it is a number of books from Bantam, a well-known publisher and part of Random House.

Update: I realize this update may be a bit buried, but I didn’t want to do a separate post for it. 🙂 It’s just something that hit me. This issue with the books not being available (but now they at least mostly are), combined with another that people have where they are being asked for a credit card when they weren’t before…that might mean a change in something connected with geography.

When the books weren’t available in the USA, I saw people saying they could get them outside.

A credit card is one way Amazon determines where an e-book sale takes place, in terms of determining rights.

What major geographic change could happen very soon?

The Fire being released in other countries.

Maybe people being asked for their credit cards only have Kindle Fires, not other Kindles, so their residency has to be determined before it happens.

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6 Responses to “Unavailable…Olympics app and some popular books”

When books that were previously available become unavailable, does that mean that people who have already bought them but deleted can no longer download them again from Amazon? One of the reasons I keep so many books on my Kindle is that I fear I might delete something and not be able to retrieve it again.

Amazon used to explicitly say that you might not be able to download something from the archives again if it was removed from the store for legal reasons.

That always made sense to me. When you download from Amazon’s archives (called the Cloud on a Kindle Fire), a new copy is made. If a book infringed on a copyright, I would think it would be illegal for Amazon to keep copying it and distributing it.

If a book is removed when that isn’t the case, I know from personal experience that you can download it again. I have a book where the author just decided not to have it in the store any more, and removed it. I can still download that.

Recently, I’ve had people telling they could redownload books they believed were removed for legal reasons. It’s possible that changed…but I think it may also be true that the illegality wasn’t sufficiently established.

I think that you losing the ability to redownload something is going to be rare, but you can certainly back up your Kindle if you like. Those file copies will generally only work on the Kindle for which they were downloaded.

For most books (I’m guessing), you are correct about the file being keyed to that specific K1. It’s worth noting that Amazon lets publishers who use their Kindle Direct Publishing to choose not to use DRM (Digital Rights Management). I wish they would put that information on the Amazon product page, but because they don’t, it’s hard to get a sense how many books that is.